"GOING AHEAD"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 487, 22 October 1948, Page 14

"GOING AHEAD"

| Written for "The Listener" by

ELSIE

LOCKE

HEN I was a child I was amazed to he&r a visitor remark to my elders and betters that a neighbouring township was "going ahead" faster than our own. Visions of the streets and houses creeping away over the hills (if they had gone in the other direction they would have sunk in the mudflats) tormented me until I could ask my mother what was meant. "Oh," she said offhandedly (she was late with the dinner) "it only means more people, more houses going up." "Why do they want more people?" "More business," she said, "more money to spend, in’ the town." I went away and thought this over. There was a piece in the puzzle that didn’t fit, and it brought me again to mother’s elbow. "Are the people in the big towns, then," I asked, "richer than those in the small towns?" Mother looked startled. "No,’ she said and after a moment, "they have more rich people, and their poor are poorer. Most of us wouldn’t be any better off." This left me exactly where I was with the problem,of "going ahead." It is obvious enough that a town gives its citizens a much broader life if it is large enough to sustain a full range of cultural and sporting and _ educational facilities -- theatres, musical societies, playing fields, swimming baths, high schools and adult education. The dullest places. are those too small for such completeness and too large for the charm of the township where everybody knows everybody else-though it’s amazing what has been done with a couple of thousand people under vigorous leadership. But when,a town or city has passed what might be called its social minimum, what special advantage is there in "going ahead?" I have stood on Mount Eden and contemplated Auckland. I have stood on the Cashmere Hills and contemplated Christchurch. The hills of Wellington and Dunedin, bless them, are se placed

that from no one point can we see too much. I have seen delightful seaside and inland places 50 miles from the Central Post Office being hooked , along as little more than! extensions of the cities. ' The sprawling, hungry size of these cities — babies as they are com-. pared with Sydney, New | York and London-is op- | pressive. Oppressive, not because) of the number of people, but because of the welter of mediocre. ‘suburban streets which ° divide the civic area. from the true country--side. 7 O-DAY I go walking | beneath the oaks of | Hagley Park, and crunching the acorns beneath my feet I ponder that exciting discussion we had with the townplanner. Oh, he wasn’t a

professional, official town-planner engaged in thinking out ways of zoning industrial and housing areas that have already grown crazily; he was a young, enthusiastic chap about to go abroad, yet so full of his ideas about New Zealand that he’d spent a ceuple of hours expounding them to a pair. of slight acquaintances, for no special reason except that we were interested in what he was saying. " I think of him in Hagley Park because he believed that four hundred and fifty acres in the heart of a city was too much. I couldn’t agree about that, being one of the Hands-off-the-Park brigade myself, and I feel the same way about Wellington’s town belt. But when he said, "Why must every house have its 20 perches of land? Why should we add section to section like rows of dominoes until we’ve laid out our cities over what ought to be farm land?"--we had to stop and repeat to ourselves, Yes, why? In England, he said, cities were cities and country was country. From the city of Oxford, with a population nearly the same as Dunedin, it was possible to reach the open fields by a walk of no more than a mile. The Canterbury founders had contemplated a Christchurch of like compactness, encompassed by its four avenues; but the pioneers’ aversion to overcrowding, their love of space, had defied all plans and created the house-and-section tradition. The idea of space was right, he said, but couldn’t we find a solution which combined spaciousness with compactness. Leave us our vegetable plot! we pleaded. Leave us a corner where the children can play! Leave us at least one row of sweet peas! Do you ever use your front lawn? he countered. .. Yes, he’d leave us the vegetable plot. He’d like to take out a dozen houses in our block and rebuild them together, perhaps in a U-shape, with sufficient division for privacy and with planning for the maximum sunshine. He'd lay cut the vegetable plots at the rear without undue wastage on paths. He’d have

lawns, flower-gardens and children’s playing ground within, and at the top of, the U. He’d even give us a well-equipped laundry and a wet weather playing room to be shared by all the families. Half the area now used by those dozen sections would actually give more value in space; our buildings would be more convenient, more original, more handsome. With this type of construction extended over the city, our transport lines would be shortened and our shopping areas more concentrated and efficient. But we'd lose some of our independence? Neighbours might get on each others’ nerves? Very well, he said, take your alternative-expensive individual housing; costly transport, drainage, gas and water and electricity; miles of good land taken up in roads; the dreary sameness of cheap streets pretending to be varied; and a growing separation between the city and the country. Have your sub-urbs-neither the one thing nor the other. ] PICK up a handful of acorns and twist them in my fingers. It’s an intriguing thought-to plan deliberately for the shrinkage of a city, to throw a cordon around the houses and plant a notice over the paddocks and plantations, Thus far and no farther. It might be thinking 2 ee a ee oe ee er ee ae

More people-more business, mv mother’s answer, had stuck in my mind because it didn’t satisfy. Why do we always want more business? One can understand the shopkeepers, the theatres, and the bus companies-but the rest of us? Is there an optimum size for a city, when its residents have every facility they need or at least the possibility of creating these facilities, and when it can say to industry: "Go elsewhere. There are medium-sized towns looking for you." It may be said that we need growth of population, influx of new industries, for stimulation, so that we shan’t degenerate into a kind of civic middle age. But need a city fear stagnation if it should be cohesive enough, bold enough to decide what it wanted and to say: We want no overgrown metropolis, no octopus suburbs eating up the countryside to which we should be bound with the constancy of the happily married? Would not a more complete interplay of city and country and provincial life be itself a stimulant to liveliness and quality? Quality. The quality of rich individual and community life. ‘But that-shades of the road-build-ers, the house-and-section peddlersthat wouldn’t be "going ahead." ---

in the future,in terms of conditions that don’t yet exist, but if we fail to contemplate, occasionally, a new thing that may seem remote, then we can never hope for conscious improvement at all. . . . I walk in the open park, which was once described to me ‘ as "a piece of the English countryside," and I think of the centennial and the Empire Games. Heaven forbid I should poke my pen-nib into that controversy; but it throws some light on this question of "going ahead."